2:30 PM Nov 28, 2008
Power Line has a couple links to Victor Davis Hanson that I found interesting:
Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts
Here'a # 9:
[T]he shrill Left is increasingly far more vicious these days than the conservative fringe, and about like the crude Right of the 1950s. Why? I am not exactly sure, other than the generic notion that utopians often believe that their anointed ends justify brutal means. Maybe it is that the Right already had its Reformation when Buckley and others purged the extremists--the Birchers, the neo-Confederates, racialists, the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracists, anti-Semites, and assorted nuts.--from the conservative ranks in a way the Left has never done with the 1960s radicals that now reappear in the form of Michael Moore, Bill Ayers, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, the Daily Kos, etc. Not many Democrats excommunicated Moveon.org for its General Betray-Us ad. Most lined up to see the premier of Moore's mythodrama. Barack Obama could subsidize a Rev. Wright or email a post-9/11 Bill Ayers in a way no conservative would even dare speak to a David Duke or Timothy McVeigh--and what Wright said was not all that different from what Duke spouts. What separated Ayers from McVeigh was chance; had the stars aligned, the Weathermen would have killed hundreds as they planned.
The remaining ones are good as well. This is contrasted with another column:
Some Random Politically-incorrect Reasons to Be
Optimistic on Thanksgiving Day
#1 is:
The question is not whether America is in decline, but whether it is in decline at a more rapid pace than true of Europe, Russia, or Asia. And one bright spot in the otherwise dark economic news will be the resilience of the United States. Forget trillions of this, and billions of that, or our sinking GDP and GNP, or deflation and unemployment rates, or all the other data—at least for a moment. Instead consider the gargantuan mess that Europe is in with its even wilder real estate market, greater deficits, and far larger banking losses from bad loans abroad. Russia is a mess; with less than $50 a barrel oil, it will be worse than a mess. Export-driven China may have trillions of US dollars in reserves, but it has tens of trillions in infrastructure investments to make before it can match US roads, dams, and airports, much less approximate our standard of living. Americans are far more meritocratic than others, success far less predicated on birth, accent, parentage, or class. We are more optimistic, and do best when pressed (Consider a broke America in 1939, and a rich America in 1946 that defeated the Axis and sent billions to its allies in the UK and Russia.). Our demography is far more encouraging than Europe’s. We react to crises far more energetically; compare US troops in Afghanistan to their NATO counterparts; or ask who adapted more successfully in Iraq—the US Marines far from home, or Al Qaeda terrorists in their own backyard? Once the dust settles on this crisis, I wager the United States will be relatively stronger after than before the meltdown. One can do almost anything with a $13 trillion economy, a two-percent-plus growing population, and a stable political system; much harder with a shrinking work force that breaks apart along class lines and resentments. Even while pundits write weekly books about the ‘end’ of the United States, or at least ‘American decline,’ the United States will emerge relatively stronger for the ordeal.
That's cheery! Read the rest.
